“What Is Literature?”
C. S. Lewis, who seems wiser the older I get, gave a series of lectures at Cambridge after transferring there from Oxford. These became An Essay on Criticism. As professor of Renaissance and Medieval Literature…
Category: World Literature
Today’s One-Liner (#327)
We always love to discuss and reveal character because human character is to us the greatest puzzle. –Isaac Bashevis Singer, in Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer, interviews by Richard Burgin, p. 47
Today’s One-Liner (#325)
I believe in Buddha kindness and nothing else, I believe in Heaven, in Angels, I eschew all Marxism and allied horseshit and psychoanalysis, and offshoot therefrom. –Jack Kerouac, Letter to Allen Ginsberg, January 1958
Today’s One-Liner (#324)
The great authors, those to whom we go back again and again throughout our lives, Shakespeare and Dante, for example, are inexhaustible. –Ralph McInerny, I Alone Have Escaped to Tell You: My Life and Pastimes,…
Take Your Pick
What is the essence of Christ’s ministry? He teaches men “not to commit stupidities.” All of Tolstoy’s brutal empiricism and aristocratic impatience resound in that extraordinary answer. The Dostoevskyan Christ, on the contrary, teaches men…
Today’s One-Liner (#318)
When the work of art invades our consciousness, something within us catches flame. –George Steiner, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism, 45
Today’s One-Liner (#315)
Perhaps it is impossible to be unbeautiful when you’re happy. –David Grossman, Be My Knife, 11
Present Moment, Awesome Moment
Goethe once said that during eighty years of life he had known eleven happy days. I imagine that everyone, in the course of their life, must have seen many hundreds of sunrises and sunsets; they…
Time Management
The famous author of western stories, Louis L’Amour, wrote a very marvelous memoir called The Education of a Wandering Man. No book is better than this one for telling us how to find the time…
Essential and Limited
And there, indeed, is one of the great and marvelous features of beautiful books (and one which will make us understand the role, at once essential and limited, that reading can play in our spiritual…